Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the quality of items and articles of manufacture produced by automated processes has been a major concern of both customers and producers. Tremendous strides have been made in the fields of quality assurance and assembly line inspection systems since the advent of video cameras, laser scanning systems, and various other sensing devices suitable for the inspection of the physical, thermal and chemical characteristics of produced substances and articles of manufacture.
For example, there exist today various inspection systems which can scan or otherwise measure the surface of a manufactured item, and can produce a three dimensional computer model of the scanned item. Various parameters of a scanned and/or inspected item, for example physical dimensions of the item, can be compared to a stored set of values associated with target values for the various parameters, and the deviations from the measured and stored values can be used to assess the quality of the inspected product. Typically, the larger the number of measurements taken by an inspection system, the more reliable it is considered. Many inspection systems today may make or extrapolate thousands, hundreds of thousand, and even millions of measurements for each inspected item.
A comparison of scanned or otherwise measured values from an inspected item can be made with a stored set of values, where the stored values typically represent target values, and can be visualized with the aid of a computer. A computer or any other computing platform having a human interface may produce a graphical representation (i.e. computer model) of scanned or otherwise measured data from an inspected item. As part of the visualization of an inspected item, deviations of measured parameter values from stored values may be indicated on a computer generated graphical representation of the inspected item.
Although great strides have been made in the inspection of individual materials or items produced in series as part of an automated process, there continues to be a need for improved methods and systems for the monitoring and visualization of the output of processes. There is a need for improved methods and systems for the visualization of manufacturing deviations across a set of items produced by a process. There also exists a need for improved methods and systems for the detection of fluctuations or instabilities in processes. And, there exists a need for improved methods and systems for the visualizing of data collected from inspected items, such that the collected data is understandable to a person monitoring a process by which the item is produced, and so that defects on an individual item and fluctuations across a process, which fluctuations may produce variations in defects across multiple items produced by the process, may be perceived by the person monitoring the process.